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“Don’t you think Ace deserves a little time and space to get looking and feeling like himself again, eat a solid meal on neutral ground and shut his eyes without looking over his shoulder for a change?”
“Of course,” Michael was quick to agree. But he darted a questioning look at Ace nonetheless. “I just wanted to make sure this is all right by my client.”
“If it was any more all right,” he said, both relieved and touched by Sierra’s consideration of how ill prepared he’d been to dive into the emotional tumult of an immediate reunion, “I’d be kissing this woman on the mouth right here and now.”
Seaver grinned. “Just don’t be late or your sister will be blowing up my phone with calls and texts. And we both know what Ainsley’s like when she drops into full protective mode.”
Cracking a smile, Ace shook the man’s
hand. “I won’t be late. I promise. I’ll even turn my phone back on—they returned it to me on the way out—once I’ve had the chance to charge it.” He wouldn’t promise to switch on the ringer, though. The thought of coping with what he suspected would be scores, or maybe hundreds, of notification tones from all the calls and messages he’d surely missed was enough to break him out in a cold sweat.
Once Seaver had climbed into his Escalade, Sierra showed Ace to a different car than the one she’d previously been driving, an older Chevy with Arizona tags. But Ace didn’t have it in him to ask what had happened to her damaged Camry, or where she was driving him as she turned away from both the ranch and his personal downtown condo.
All he could manage was, “I still don’t know what I’m doing here instead of getting my head caved in about now by a couple of choice inmates while the guards look the other way.”
She winced. “Sounds like a good time. But didn’t they explain it to you inside? Why the charges were dropped?”
“Dropped for now, pending further evidence. I did catch that part. I’m afraid that after that, though,” he admitted, “the rest was drowned out by the roaring in my ears and the pounding in my chest. So I have no idea how you pulled off this miracle.”
“Don’t give me too much credit,” she said, using one hand to wave off his statement. “The whole thing was a team effort.” She described her visit to Destiny’s bank, along with how the manager had escorted her out after she’d started asking questions about the missing teller. “So after I found Destiny shacked up with her boyfriend, whom Spencer told me was a serious drug dealer, I suggested that the police start digging into her activities over at the bank.”
“I did catch something about financial crimes,” Ace recalled, noticing Sierra’s frequent glances at her mirrors and how carefully she’d been checking every parked vehicle they passed. “But what’s any of that got to do with Destiny’s testimony against me?”
“I’m getting to all that,” she said, slowing as a bell dinged, a red light flashed and a pair of rail crossing arms came down to block the road ahead for an approaching train. “Oh, great,” she grumbled, her hands knotting on the wheel.
“Is everything okay?” Ace asked her. “You seem a little—”
“Sure, yeah,” Sierra said dismissively. “Just eager to get you away from here and back to the free world as fast as possible.”
Shaking off the interruption, she went on to explain, “After Destiny’s disappearance, her manager had discovered evidence that she’d been laundering money for her creepy boyfriend’s drug operation—enough to send her to federal prison for at least a decade, with zero possibility of parole.”
“Sounds like a solid dose of karma, considering all the lies she’s told about me,” Ace said, not giving a damn if it made him sound bitter.
“Except Destiny wasn’t too keen on the idea,” Sierra said as the engine passed, “so she cried and pleaded and finally offered to come clean about the so-called confession. All Spencer had to do was agree not to turn her over to the feds.”
“So he made the deal?” Ace asked, absently watching as the rail cars, many of them marked with colorful graffiti, clattered along.
She nodded. “The feds would get the drug supplier, which was who they were really after, and Spencer wanted the truth. The truth about what really happened to your father. About what’s really been happening with your family since that email arrived claiming you’d been switched for the real Ace Colton soon after birth.”
His gut tightened, as it always did, at the thought that there was another version of him, his family’s missing son and brother, out there somewhere. That he’d been the cuckoo’s egg left in the nest. Though he’d been told there was a reason to believe he’d been the son of a long-missing nurse named Luella Smith, he had to wonder if anyone in his family had had any luck tracking her—or the prodigal firstborn Colton heir—down while he was gone.
But those questions, he’d known for the past month, would do nothing except drag him down a rabbit hole of misery, so he dragged his brain back to the conversation at hand.
“So what did Destiny tell him?” It must have been something pretty big, since he was sitting here with Sierra rather than killing time—or possibly dodging fists, thanks to his guard friend—behind bars.
“She said someone called out of the blue and offered her ten grand to plant the gun inside your condo when you’d be otherwise engaged. Then she was instructed to call the cops and give them the whole pillow talk story—”
“I’ve said it from the start. I never touched that woman.”
“Even she admits that now,” Sierra told him, startling as a poorly dressed, stooped man shuffled past them on the street, drinking from a longneck, partly wrapped up in a paper bag. If the suddenness of his appearance caught Ace off guard, the slip in the bounty hunter’s normally cool demeanor surprised him even more.
“That old fellow’s harmless enough. He’s always around this neighborhood,” Ace reassured her, now certain that something was amiss. “Definitely a local, if you’re still worried about your friends from—”
“Ice Veins is in the morgue, so everything’s okay now,” Sierra said in the tone of someone who might be trying to convince herself of something. “Just taking note of my surroundings.”
“Is that why you switched cars, too?” he asked, peering at her through narrowed eyes. “Or is this one just a loaner while yours is in for repairs?”
She hesitated before answering with one of her usual shrugs. “So I’m still a little keyed up. Who wouldn’t be? Some habits are harder to get past than others.”
